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While Soundex does help where spellings vary in names, it can easily miss list some important variations. This is especially true where the initial character of a name was missed or coded incorrectly. Using a literal 'bin' character at the beginning of names makes them much easier to find but it also aggravates this problem. Be sure to check alternate initial characters for names, especially if the names started with vowels (initial vowels were often dropped when going from spoken to written names).

A LITTLE ABOUT SOUNDEX: Soundex is a method that attempts to identify similarities in words by identifying basic sounds in the words and then sorting based on those sounds. If the algorithm has too many sounds defined then the resulting sort produces a list which is mostly alphabetical and too few sounds produces a list with no sort at all. Neither of these extremes is of much value here so, the challenge is in defining the optimal number of sounds which makes the resulting sorted list most useful.

Traditional algorithms have used about six sounds, limited the resulting code to four characters, not included vowels, and made little effort to classify sounds based on multiple letter combinations. I have modified this by using ten distinct sounds, allowing the code to extend to eight characters, and identifying some of the two letter sounds. I have kept some information from the vowels, not so much for their individual sounds, but more for identifying syllables. I find that syllable counts help to group words when translating from their sounds to the written version. I will continue to "tweak" the algorithm used here as I can find other approaches which help to pull similar sounding names together.

You may find your browser's 'find' function of value in getting to the names of interest to you. The numbers in parenthesis on this list are the number of occurrences of that last and first name combination which can be found on the Master Name Index, to which this list links.

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